Pentax

This is a roll of Kodak Eastman Double-X 35mm black & white cinema film known for its fine detail in both shade and highlights and good depth of field in low light. It was made famous for its use in Schindler’s List, Memento, and the opening sequence of Casino Royal. This particular roll of film came from The Film Photography Project (FPP) which they purchased in bulk and have for sale as Cinema XX at the FPP Store. Michael Raso sent a batch across the Atlantic for participants of the FPP 2013 London Meet-Up back in August. I had only a medium format camera on me that day, so I didn’t get around to using the film until early last month. I found it to draw an excellent picture, very low-contrast, and well-suited to my preference for fine-grain. It truly lived up to its reputation for fine detail through a broad range of tones.

Developing Eastman, however, XX proved to be a nervous adventure of research and experimentation. There is not the abundance of shared processing knowledge for this film as there is for standard still-camera 35mm black and white negative films. I greatly appreciate the sharing of developing recipes, because film isn’t cheap, and I’d like to get it right on the first roll, if possible. I saw a few user recipes in my hunt, but almost no examples using T-Max Dev (the only chemicals I had on hand) and no one who was using TMax who had also divulged their processing methods. So, after having compared developing recipes across the variety of developers and pouring over the results, I compared the processing of familiar still-camera films with T-Max vs. those same still-camera films with the developers I’d also seen used for the Eastman XX. All this was in hopes of getting an idea of how to adapt a successful recipe to my developer, and I finally decided to try 7 minutes at 21 degrees (by then, to a great extent because that was the current temperature of my T-Max).